Monthly Archives: January 2009

The fabs are now in rehearsal mode. They are on their “Let It Be” instruments: Paul on piano, George on guitar, Ringo on drums and Billy on organ. This leaves John on bass duties, a role he hardly relishes. He complains to Paul that he “can’t get a neat sound out of it–so that the fat string doesn’t go ‘ppffft.'” Paul coaches him with, as always, an example from their prior recording history, “Bass is, uh, if you get into it a bit like guitar but fatter. That’s another way: play high, don’t play fat–another style altogether, like “Rain,” you know, I did that.”

Feeling he has properly placated John, Paul is almost ready to get into “Let It Be,” but not until after a brief detour through The Killer’ssongbook. They also do a fantastic “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying.” Not thatone, but a song that Ray Charles recorded. While Paul messes around some more, George tells John of an interview he had read the night before with Wilson Pickett, where Pickett said that ‘”Hey Jude” is “the most beautiful song he’s ever heard.” While he gets no argument from me on that one, Pickett hasn’t heard “Let It Be” yet. The fabs seem accustom to this sort of praise and launch right into the first “Let It Be” of the day. Nearly thirty will follow.

During a break between run throughs of “Let It Be,” it becomes apparent that George is looking at some kind of girlie magazine (“look at her.”). John feels that Apple should publish its own girlie magazine filled with photos of Apple blonds. He then asks if anyone has heard of the American group called The Motherfuckers (“they’re never going to get into Billboard.”). Lennon is only half correct here, there was a group called The Motherfuckers, but they were a political activist group and not a musical act. John’s idea of a band called The Motherfuckers causes Paul to launch into one of his earliest compositions, a schmaltzy ditty drenched in “show biz” entitled “Suicide.” This song also has a Sinatra connection. Paul offered it to Sinatra a few years earlier and Sinatra rejected it saying, “The guy’s out of his fucking mind. I wouldn’t sing that on my crapper.” George and John join in on “Suicide.” The fabs never recorded the song properly but Paul thought enough of it to include a snippet of it (between “Hot as Sun,” another early Macca composition that makes an appearance during these sessions, and “Junk”) on his first solo LP.

After several renditions of “Let It Be,” during which they get increasingly close to nailing it except for a few minor issues, George takes it upon himself to finalize the arrangement telling the others when their solos come in, how many verses come between choruses and so forth. He observes that the song is “very country and western.” Lennon corrects him, “country and gospel.” Throughout these Get Back tapes, George is heard more than once making arrangement decisions on Lennon/McCartney songs. It’s getting near lunch time and it seems as though everyone wants to eat. Paul tells them that they’ll “do it…twice more and have a ten minute ‘put your feet up, lads.'” Between the two takes, John comes up with this inspired bit of nonsense:

Directly after this, the fabs pull off one of their more impressive feats of the day, an extended jam that eventually got the title “Dig It.” Anyone familiar with the finished Let It Be LP has heard the forty-nine seconds of this included there. Including it in such a truncated form is one of the more bizarre decisions that Spector made when compiling that record. In fact the version of the song that that short segment was extracted from runs a full fifteen minutes long; incorporates elements of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout;” and features the vocal stylings of six-year-old Heather whose screeching is at times oddly similar to Yoko’s. After seven minutes, Heather, who mostly moans and sings the words “bang, bang, bang” entirely too close to the microphone, loses interest (or is overcome by a need to dance) and it is at that point where the song picks up in the film. Don’t miss George Martin on that shaker.

Heather rocks pretty hard, not surprising when one considers that she would be an eventual follower of Echo and the Bunnymen (the other fab four from Liverpool):

Upon completion of these sessions, there was talk of there being a second record, one of rock and roll oldies, emerging from the hundreds of hours of recordings, but the quality of the oldies performed throughout the month varies wildly, with most being marred by the band’s (especially Lennon’s) inability to remember song lyrics. Out of the oldies played on this day, some eventually made it onto Anthology Three but those tracks were infuriatingly edited and polished.

Seeing as how three people were kind enough to compliment me on earlier installments of this feature, here is the sequel. I am picking up almost two weeks after the thirteenth of January, which was arguably the least productive day of the entire Get Back project. (Well, the fourteenth might edge out the thirteenth–little outside of “Watching Rainbows” happened on that day.) Since we left off, George has agreed to come back to work provided the rehearsal sessions take place at Apple instead of the Twickenham film studios; the fabs have gotten a bit more serious about their rehearsals and have been joined by keyboard player Billy Preston, who was invited to work on the sessions by Harrison.

The day begins with only Ringo and Georges Harrison and Martin present. Harrison takes advantage of the absence of the groups’ two principle songwriters to try out some of the material he has been squirreling away for the past few years. He introduces his “Isn’t It a Pity” by explaining that he had written the song “about three years ago and I…sung it to John and he said, ‘that’s too much like fuckin…’ you know. Anyway, but I thought it was good.” He goes on to explain that while “in L.A.,” a friend who had some association with Reprise Records asked George if he’s “got a song for Sinatra.” George thought to himself, “that’s nice, fancy him wanting one of my songs.” But then he thought about what “horseshit” the by-then way past-his-prime Sinatra was accustomed to recording, and decided “fuck that, I’m not letting him sing it. He just learns it and he comes in and the band has learned it and just walks in and does it in, like, two takes and that’s it…because there’s nothing more that he’s going to do with it even if he does ten takes.” After playing a lovely “Isn’t It a Pity,” he describes his never-released song, “Window, Window,” as an “Irish or Scottish reel or jig or something like that.”

Before playing “Let It Down,” George remarks that he wishes that he could “come in here and feel the way you feel when you’re leaving, because there’s not too much difference except I was over there [yesterday] and I had the brown trousers on…it’s exactly the same: same songs, same ciggy.” George smokes Kents by the way.

Next George asks Ringo if he has written any more words to any of the songs he’s in the process of writing. At this point Ringo has only one full song under his belt, “Don’t Pass Me By” from the previous year’s self-titled LP. That song had a four year gestation period–it was first mentioned, and dismissed by the other fabs, in a 1964 BBC broadcast. In these sessions, Ringo has played two songs-in-progress on the piano for his bandmates, one is called “Pablo Picasso” and the other “Takin’ a Trip to Carolina.” While Ringo’s composition skills are minimal when compared to his absurdly talented bandmates, he has never been without his share of fans: Harrison has already reported that “Don’t Pass Me By” was Dylan and The Band’s favorite track off of the white album. On this morning, instead of messing around with “Picasso” or “Carolina,” Ringo plays for George a new song, one that had gone unnoticed by John and Paul when he debuted it for them three days earlier. He calls it “the octopus one.” Ringo plays what he has so far of “Octopus’s Garden”–the tune and some of the lyrics to the first verse–and the others react with enthusiasm that was missing when Ringo performed the song for John and Paul. Immediately all assembled get to work on fleshing out the song with Harrison contributing more than the eventual songwriting credit would suggest.

The song is worked on for nearly an hour during which time the Lennons and Paul, Linda and Heather arrive. John goes straight behind the drum kit and thrashes about. George and Ringo crack one another up by changing the chorus’ lyric to “octopussy’s garden.” Some of this can be seen in the “Let It Be” film (unfortunately, the better of the two clips of this available on youtube doesn’t allow embedding but can be seen here <–this clip gives us a better look at the amazing outfit that Heather was dressed in that day than the one below does.)

Paul comes in asking the others what they thought of "the dubs"–recordings of the songs they’ve been working on that each went home with the night before–Ringo listened to them and deemed them "terrible," George agrees and Lennon admits to having "left [his] in the car." Paul meanwhile thinks that the dubs are evidence that The Beatles are "the greatest band ever." He’s correct there. Lennon changes the subject by bizarrely asking Paul, "Hey, did you dream about me last night?" Paul doesn’t remember his dreams. Lennon had a "very strong dream–we were both terrified! Different dreams but you must have been there. I was touching you." Paul does his best to ignore this as everyone goes back into "Octopus’s Garden." Lennon works in a bit of Donnie Elbert’s "Little Piece of Leather,” which, up until a minute ago, I though he had made up on the spot. It’s not an improvised Lennon original as I had thought, but an old R&B tune. A bit of back story is given by Ringo with support from George on what exactly an octopus’s garden is. As Harrison explains, it turns out that “octopuses pick up all the seashells, do you know about that? They collect all nice-looking things and make a garden around where they are just with all the groovy things they find.

As work on “Octopus’s Garden” winds down, Heather becomes increasingly vocal. First she announces that her cat has had kittens (Lennon inquires if she plans on eating them, “lots of people do. You put pastry ’round them and have cat pie.”) and then launches into extended impressions of alternately “a pussy cat who was just born” and “a tame tiger” (“if I wasn’t tame I might scratch you. And I might eat you but I’m too tame to.”) After a bit of this she excuses herself saying she’s going “next door.” Paul tells her she can go anywhere she pleases so long as she doesn’t “interfere with anyone.”

She picked a good time to leave as the fabs, Glyn and George Martin are getting in to the tedious business of listening to several “playbacks” of the previous day’s work. These playbacks are possibly the most frustrating parts of these Get Back tapes–just as you begin to think that you can’t bear to listen to another mediocre take of, say, “Dig A Pony,” the band retires to the control room to rewind the tape and listen to whatever it is they’ve just recorded–now you’re not only listening to the same mediocre takes of “Dig A Pony” again, but you’re listening to them with the fabs talking over them and you can barely make out what is being said.

On this morning the band is listening to several renditions of “For You Blue” that they had recorded the day before. It takes some time for Glyn to find the take of “For You Blue” that they are looking for and then there is debate as to whether it’s the “good” one or not. Thankfully, the tame tiger returns to liven things up with more talk of kittens and band aids and chap stick. This kitten talk causes Lennon to observe that “they always make cat food tins too small.” Paul and Linda insist that canned food “isn’t any good for them.” George says his cats “really dig turkey and rabbit…fish too.” John also likes to give his cats ping pong balls to play with. Heather and Ringo list the various animals that jump. The fabs then listen to two different takes of “Let It Be” from the day before. The song still needs a lot of work.